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Saturday, March 1, 2014

JAL inflight wifi is a much better value than ANA

Posted by
SBS

Japan Airlines inflight wifi service, JAL Sky Wifi, is so much of a better value than All Nippon Airways' ANA Wifi Service, that there is simply no comparison. For $21.95US ($19.75 if you pay with a JAL credit card), you can have unlimited internet for 24 hours.

ANA charges slightly more, $24US, for which you get 20MB.

Yes, 20 whole Megabytes. That's all. Once you use that up, you can buy more. What a joke. The only way ANA would be a better value is if you just needed to urgently check an email. You could buy the 5MB plan and hope there are not automatically downloaded attachments. The routes on which ANA Wifi Service is available is also not set. There are a total of only 3 planes that are equipped.

13 comments:

Japan Airlines air fares have become much more competitive in recent years, too. For a Tokyo-San Francisco round-trip flight last summer, I got a better deal on JAL than I would have if I had flown Singapore (which is usually the low-cost leader among Asia-based carriers).

Okay, so I went to a different store and told them I had my friend's old DoCoMo Galaxy S3 at home and wanted to use it. They gave me a micro sim and changed me over to the Xi plan no questions asked. I am happy to report my American Play Store bought N5 works perfectly including LTE on DoCoMo's network here in Okinawa.

I had the 'pleasure' of experiencing T-Mobile's service on a recent Lufthansa/ANA codeshare flight from Frankfurt to Narita. While there is little point in arguing the price, which I agree is quite fair for around 20quid, the service was absolutely horrendous. Access to the internet was extremely unsteady, slow and had an awful ping, which made it extremely unpleasant to even check news sites.

If the service level is like this, I feel that there is little point in whether they charge you 10 or 100 quid, as I am not willing to pay for this at all. When checking out http://www.onair.aero/en/commercial-airlines-products, I found out that they a service that allows you to browse the local entertainment content on your own device. We would of course need to see how this plays out under real life conditions, but I would be more than happy if I was no longer dependent on the low quality screens of an airplane, and could you use my own preferred gadget for viewing/listening.

That is being included in a lot of new planes. I think the JAL 787-800s and the 777-300 "sky suites" let you plug your device straight in and watch your own content. Actually, JAL has a very good audio and video selection relative to many other carriers.

Really? As far as I know the hardware is identical and so are the factory images. Even the baseband versions are exactly same irrespective of Emobile version of GP version. Both the GP Japan version and Emobile versions are D821 so no difference.

Yes, I would consider pdadb to be accurate. However, in case of EM01L spec sheet, it does say that the datasheet state is "Preliminary".

I have an EM01L that I am using on the Docomo network and quite sure that it works well in FOMA Plus area (UMTS Band 6)

Since the preliminary sheet does not mention UMTS Band 6 to be part of EM01L, I would assume that the Nexus 5 data sheet with datasheet state as "Final" is what is applicable to the Nexus 5 from Emobile as well.